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November 2010

 
Contributors
 

María Teresa Andruetto
Marcelo Cohen
Eugenio Conchez
P. Scott Cunningham
Ruth Fogelman
Jennifer Hearn
William Hershaw
Alexander Hutchison
Stephanie Johnson
Channah Magori
Vasyl Makhno
Osip Mandelstam
Geraldine Maxwell
María Negroni
Orest Popovych
Pauline Prior-Pitt
Ian Probstein
Cynthia Rimsky
Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Issue 13 Guest Artist:
Rodolfo Zagert

 
(Issue 13 Feature: 15 Miami Poets)
 
Elisa Albo
Howard Camner
Adrian Castro
Denise Duhamel
Corey Ginsberg
Michael Hettich
Miriam Levine
Christopher Louvet
Jesse Millner
Barbra Nightingale
Geoffrey Philp
Laura Richardson
Alexis Sellas
Virgil Suárez
Nick Vagnoni

15 Miami Poets Guest Artist:
Xavier Cortada

President: Peter Robertson
Vice-President: Sari Nusseibeh
Deputy Editor: Jill Dawson
General Editor: Beatriz Hausner
Art Editor: Calum Colvin
Deputy General Editor: Jeff Barry

Consulting Editors
Marjorie Agosín
Daniel Albright
Meena Alexander
Maria Teresa Andruetto
Frank Ankersmit
Rosemary Ashton
Reza Aslan
Leonard Barkan
Michael Barry
Shadi Bartsch
Thomas Bartscherer
Susan Bassnett
Gillian Beer
David Bellos
Richard Berengarten
Charles Bernstein
Sujata Bhatt
Mario Biagioli
Jean Boase-Beier
Elleke Boehmer
Eavan Boland
Stephen Booth
Alain de Botton
Carmen Boullossa
Rachel Bowlby
Svetlana Boym
Peter Brooks
Marina Brownlee
Roberto Brodsky
Carmen Bugan
Jenni Calder
Stanley Cavell
Sampurna Chattarji
Sarah Churchwell
Hollis Clayson
Sally Cline
Kristina Cordero
Drucilla Cornell
Junot Díaz
André Dombrowski
Denis Donoghue
Ariel Dorfman
Rita Dove
Denise Duhamel
Klaus Ebner
Robert Elsie
Stefano Evangelista
Orlando Figes
Tibor Fischer
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Peter France
Nancy Fraser
Maureen Freely
Michael Fried
Marjorie Garber
Anne Garréta
Marilyn Gaull
Zulfikar Ghose
Paul Giles
Lydia Goehr
Vasco Graça Moura
A. C. Grayling
Stephen Greenblatt
Lavinia Greenlaw
Lawrence Grossberg
Edith Grossman
Elizabeth Grosz
Boris Groys
David Harsent
Benjamin Harshav
Geoffrey Hartman
François Hartog
Siobhan Harvey
Molly Haskell
Selina Hastings
Valerie Henitiuk
Kathryn Hughes
Aamer Hussein
Djelal Kadir
Kapka Kassabova
John Kelly
Martin Kern
Mimi Khalvati
Joseph Koerner
Annette Kolodny
Julia Kristeva
George Landow
Chang-Rae Lee
Mabel Lee
Linda Leith
Suzanne Jill Levine
Lydia Liu
Margot Livesey
Julia Lovell
Laurie Maguire
Willy Maley
Alberto Manguel
Ben Marcus
Paul Mariani
Marina Mayoral
Richard McCabe
Campbell McGrath
Jamie McKendrick
Edie Meidav
Jack Miles
Toril Moi
Susana Moore
Laura Mulvey
Azar Nafisi
Paschalis Nikolaou
Martha Nussbaum
Sari Nusseibeh
Tim Parks
Molly Peacock
Pascale Petit
Clare Pettitt
Caryl Phillips
Robert Pinsky
Elena Poniatowska
Elizabeth Powers
Elizabeth Prettejohn
Martin Puchner
Kate Pullinger
Paula Rabinowitz
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
James Richardson
François Rigolot
Geoffrey Robertson
Ritchie Robertson
Avital Ronell
Élisabeth Roudinesco
Carla Sassi
Michael Scammell
Celeste Schenck
Sudeep Sen
Hadaa Sendoo
Miranda Seymour
Mimi Sheller
Elaine Showalter
Penelope Shuttle
Werner Sollors
Frances Spalding
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Julian Stallabrass
Susan Stewart
Rebecca Stott
Mark Strand
Kathryn Sutherland
Rebecca Swift
Susan Tiberghien
John Whittier Treat
David Treuer
David Trinidad
Marjorie Trusted
Lidia Vianu
Victor Vitanza
Marina Warner
David Wellbery
Edwin Williamson
Michael Wood
Theodore Zeldin

Associate Editor: Neil Langdon Inglis
Assistant Editor: Ana de Biase
Assistant Editor: Eugenio Conchez
Assistant Editor: Patricia Delmar
Assistant Editor: Sophie Lewis
Assistant Editor: Siska Rappé
Art Consultant: Angie Roytgolz

 
Click to enlarge picture Click to enlarge picture. Three Poems by P. Scott Cunningham  

 


In the Future

all exams will contain four Morton Feldman questions:

1) List from most accessible to least accessible all 181 of Feldman’s compositions
2) Name three people Feldman made love to
3) Hum Rothko Chapel
4) What does sound mean?

In the future,

  • All corporate jingles will derive from Feldman’s music
  • The beat of the human heart has been proven to be atonal
  • Before dinner, it is customary to read a Morton Feldman essay or two
  • The word “boredom” now means “a state of liminal ecstasy”, as in “This sex that we’re having on the edge of an Aegean cliff, Turkish heroin electrocuting our veins, is boring”
  • To express excitement or approval for the home team at sporting events, the crowd goes silent
  • Jazz has been declared “silly”
  • The French are derided as hopelessly narrow-minded
  • Density of conversation, as in talking too much when one is talking, and then making no sounds at all when one is not talking, is considered a hallmark of genius
  • Anecdotes are traded on the stock exchange, where Feldman anecdotes remain the most valuable. Like this one,

Feldman was dying in the hospital in Buffalo. The cancer had spread too quickly. Barbara was with him, and he was ready, telling her he had lived a full life and had no regrets. Only one thing was bothering him, the beep of the EKG machine. “It sounds like something I would have written,” he said, “like hearing myself thinking.” He asked the nurse if she could turn it off. “That’s against the law,” she said. Could he could play a record over it? What if he called in a few friends and they hooked themselves up to one, too? By now snow was falling into the dusk, and the situation was hopeless. Feldman took Barbara’s hand and said, “I know how to stop the beeping.” And then he did.


A Famous Anecdote in Reverse

Jackson Pollack!
A man walking with his hands in his pockets
The intersection of 6th Ave & Fourteenth St.
Feldman turns and looks
Wolpe points toward the street
What about the common man?
I care about the sounds
It’s too esoteric
Feldman plays
Play it
I brought something new
Have a cup of tea
Wolpe!
Feldman!
The tea is boiling
Steps creak
The long subway ride
The sun rises
Strange, indecipherable dreams


Buffalo ‘86

The snow in Buffalo blows
to and fro
burying cars along the avenue home.

No
one’s inside to turn their radios on
so
silence plays silently to no one—

rows of sunken clouds
domes of metal, leather and snow.

I can’t open the window
so the television’s on—
news like a fog horn
an always-ringing phone

the fathers and husbands of Buffalo
emerging, at dawn, from their homes—

heavy-clothed
armed with brushes and shovels.

One by one
they scrape off the snow
the engines turn on

and I open the lid of my piano.